Last year our oldest child took the PSAT for the first time at our local public high school. He will not be taking it tomorrow with the other students his age because we are working on requesting accommodations for testing and did not have them approved for this date. However, his first experience last year ended up going a lot better than I thought it would. Here are some thoughts from that time.
Our oldest survived his first PSAT! I have been gleaning tons of information from Lee Binz at TheHomescholar.com for over a year now and one of the things that she talks about is how to help our home school high school students to prepare for taking tests like the SAT and ACT. She encourages us to have our kids take the PSAT their sophomore year "for fun" as a practice test, when the score does not really matter. So, I listened to her wise instruction and went into the high school guidance office and spoke with the counselor who has helped us before. We both agreed that even though my son may need accommodations for testing situations, it might be good for him to test without them first and see what he thinks he would need.
When I first brought up the idea, our son was not happy! He did not think he needed to do this test and did not want to hear about it. However, as time passed and we talked about it a little bit here and there, I think he realized that all of the other sophomores who are his friends on the football team would be taking it the same day.
With about a month to get used to the idea, he accepted his fate. The day before, I showed him some questions from the PSAT section of a test preparation book and the College Board website. I think it helped him to go through a few of these in order to understand the instructions and to have some idea of what the questions would be like. I also bought him a whole new pack of sharpened #2 pencils and a calculator (that wasn't on his phone). We made sure he was up early that morning with time to eat breakfast and that he had time to arrive early. When I dropped him off, he seemed confident.
After the test, he seemed like he felt pretty good about it! He was assigned a seat next to a friend on the football team and he even shared his new pencils with friends who had forgotten to get #2 pencils for the test. He said that he had plenty of time to finish each section. He was glad that he has had some Algebra, but wasn't upset that he didn't know all of the math, since he knew that this test didn't really count, yet. Filling out the information on the test form was probably the most tricky for him!
So, I encourage you to help your student register for the PSAT when it rolls around next fall if they are in 10th or 11th grade. It really did serve as a low pressure way for him to try a first shot at one of these standardized tests and is a great way to practice test taking skills.
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